Family, friends, and business contacts are often spread throughout the world, involved in various activities. Placing a telephone call to a contact is a common way of communicating with the contact. A contact may not be willing to accept a telephone call, however, depending on an activity the contact is engaged in during the time of the call. For example, a contact may be in a business meeting and may not want to be disturbed. A contact may turn off his telephone or the ringer on the telephone while in the meeting, although that may prevent callers from reaching the contact in case of an emergency. Further, a contact may not always remember to turn off the telephone or to place the phone in silent mode while in the meeting, where the sound of a ringing phone may be disruptive.
Alternatively, a caller may not wish to disturb a contact if the caller were to know the availability status of the contact. For example, a caller may not want to disturb a contact when the contact is in a business meeting. The caller may decide that the call is not important and may choose to wait until another time to call the contact. A caller may obtain an availability status of a contact from a social network, such as Facebook® and Twitter®, or a location based service (LBS), such as Google Latitude™ and Foursquare®. However, this requires the caller to access the social network or LBS independently of making the telephone call, which is inconvenient for the caller. Additionally, a caller may not remember to first check an availability status of a contact before calling the contact.